Google: Spam volume for Q1 back to pre-McColo levels

It took only a couple of months for cybercriminals to catch-up and reintroduce the massive spam volumes that briefly disappeared following the shutdown of the cybercrime ecosystem's sitting duck McColo in November, 2008.According to Google's Postini Spam data and trends for Q1 2009, during the first quarter of the year the spam volume was the strongest since 2008, increasing with an average of 1.

Spammers have recovered from the McColo shutdown - it's a fact. But with Conficker in a standby mode, it's worth discussing the (mini) botnets currently responsible for the increasing spam volume, and how have spammers adapted in order to improve their resilience to potential attempts to shut down their operations.

With decentralization of command and control locations/communications, and standartization of the spamming process with quality assurance in mind in the face of managed spam services, spam, in between the rest of the malicious activities streaming from the infected hosts, are not going away. Interestingly, despite the fact that the money made from spam look like pocket change compared to the money made from rogue security software and the process of monetizing the botnet by partitioning it (Into the Srizbi's botnet business model; Money Mule Recruiters use ASProx's Fast Fluxing Services) cybercriminals won't given up on their equally distributed revenue stream.